"The Disastrous Ordeal of 1987", D. Graeber

What follows is the epilogue to "The Disastrous
Ordeal of 1987", which is an historical ethnography
about a village called Betafo in central Madagascar,
by me, David Graeber.
By the way: the definitions of political action which
I allude to but don't quote is: 'political action consists
of actions intended to influence people who are not
present when the action is being taken' (i.e., by being
represented to others later; though this does not mean
it cannot be intended to influence people who _are_
there, too) and 'political power is the ability to
stop others from acting that way.'
If anyone gets around to reading it, I'd love to know
what people think.

EPILOGUE

It might be useful to close with some words on why
I chose to write this book the way I did. In purely
formal terms, it is a rather unusual ethnography. Its
style is at times almost novelistic; at others, it
shifts into much more conventional modes of ethnographic
or historical writing. The same characters who appear
in one part of the text as actors often reappear in
others as narrators or analysts, providing (often critical)
commentary about customs, local issues, and about each
other. When I began writing the book, I had not entirely
worked out most of the theoretical ideas about politics
and narrative that now appear in it; so I cannot really
say that I wrote it the way I did because of them.
But I did want to convey the sense I had of the people
I knew in Betafo as both actors in history, and as
themselves historians. According to the very broad
set of definitions I did work out in the course of
writing, to represent them in this way is also to represent
them as political beings. It is, I have argued, in
so far as we all act in, recount, interpret and criticize
our social worlds that we are all political beings
of one sort or another.(1)
Throughout the book, I have tried, whenever possible,
to emphasize such areas of common ground. In fact,
if there was one impulse--one might even say one moral
imperative--that drove me from the very beginning,
it was a desire to explode some of the sense of artificial
distance that so many ethnographies create between
author, audience, and the people who are being studied.
I wanted the reader to be able to think of the inhabitants
of Betafo as people they could at least imagine meeting
and who, under the right set of circumstances, they
might actually get to know. If nothing else, I have
tried at least in small ways to always emphasize how--cultural
differences notwithstanding--we do inhabit the same
world, and ultimately the same history and the same
moral universe; or, if one wants to define history
in a more culturally specific fashion, then at the
very least, that we all could be sharing one.
At the end of chapter 11, I suggested that one way
anthropologists could begin to undermine this sense
of distance would be to look at what we are doing as
more akin to history than to what we would normally
consider science. Now, in saying this, I didn't really
mean to weigh in to the sporadic debate in anthropology
about whether the discipline should define itself as
a science or a humanity. To me at least, it seems a
silly argument: after all, people who are mainly interested
in, say, problems of nutrition or verb structure are
obviously going to be relying on a different set of
methods than people who are mainly interested in historical
consciousness; as long as we all happen to be tumbled
together in the same departments, it seems only reasonable
to allow that our discipline is a hodgepodge and leave
it at that. But the debate does raise some interesting
issues. Why exactly is it, for instance, that history
is considered one of the Humanities, and not a Social
Science? Obviously there are historical reasons--there
were people who considered themselves historians long
before there were ones who considered themselves social
scientists (or for that matter natural scientists).
But if it has remained among the Humanities, in the
company of the study of literature, art, and philosophy
and not that of sociology or political science, I suspect
it is ultimately because of some sense that science
deals with regularities, if not with 'laws', then at
the very least with things that are to some degree
predictable, and that history tends to focus on the
very opposite, on the irregular and unpredictable,
on events that could no more have been predicted, before
they happened, than the production of a novel or a
work of art.
For some, I will allow, this might seem a rather old-fashioned
view of history. Certainly, not all modern historians
feel their discipline should even be among the humanities;
there are many proponents of a "science of history"--one
which can make predictions. In ways the debate within
history parallels the one in anthropology. Much of
the literature about the nature of narrative which
I made use of in the introduction to chapter 7, in
fact, emerges from just such a debate (Rosaldo 1989:127-143
provides a useful summary)--in which a set of historians
and philosophers of history, having been told that
no one had any reason to take them seriously as long
as they were simply telling stories and not coming
up with any generalizable laws, ended up formulating
a defense of 'narrative understanding' as an alternate,
and perfectly legitimate, way of knowing. I am, as
the reader might imagine, sympathetic to their position.
In fact, I would take the argument much further. It
seems to me that, at least in anthropology, it is this
very concern with science, laws, and regularities that
has been responsible for creating the sense of distance
I have been trying so hard to efface; it is, paradoxically
enough, the desire to seem objective that has been
largely responsible for creating the impression that
the people we study are some exotic, alien, ultimately
unknowable Other.
Let me provide a few examples of what I mean by this.
European documents concerning Madagascar written before
the French conquest are remarkably different in tone
than those written afterwards. I remember being quite
struck by this while doing research in the Malagasy
archives. It seemed as if in 1895, the whole character
of the country changed. The Madagascar one reads about
in 19th century documents documents was a place full
of recognizable individuals: politicians, princesses,
humble rural pastors or wandering sorcerers, bandits,
generals, Christian martyrs. Documents by missionaries,
European agents and travelers were all the same in
this respect; even political dispatches tended to taken
up with speculation about the motivations, affinities,
and likely plans of government ministers or potential
revolutionaries. The authors were full of all sorts
of biases, and most of the portraits are pretty two-dimensional,
but at least they were usually making a sincere effort
to understand the motives of the people about whom
they were writing, for the simple reason that they
had to. After all, they were visitors in an independent
country, and these were people with some power to affect
their lives. Almost the moment Madagascar lost its
independence, the human beings also disappear. Documents
from the colonial period consist either of vague, descriptive
generalities, or (even more) of tedious accounts of
administration, along with scientific dispatches and
reports.
Margaret Weiner (1995) has recently noted much the
same transformation in comparing records from before
the Dutch conquest of southern Bali in 1908 to those
which came after it; after conquest, accounts of personalities
and dramatic events are immediately replaced by bureaucratic
"discussions of finance, agricultural production,
construction, and public health. It was," she
writes, "as if once a region was brought under
colonial domination, nothing happened there any longer...
The colonial state produced knowledge mainly in the
form of statistics and regularities" (Weiner 1995:90).
One reason why individuals disappear from colonial
documents is, clearly, because the authors were no
longer obliged to take account of them; one of the
first things a colonial regime tends to do is to create
a political climate in which no single inhabitant of
the country is in a position to do anything which could
have much of an effect on them. But it was also because
they conceived of what they were doing, their mode
of rule, in very scientific terms. Hence the 'statistics
and regularities'. Colonial governments saw themselves
as applying techniques of scientific administration,
which could bring the country's economy and society
as much as possible under complete, predictable control,
and in doing so establish the very parameters within
which meaningful action was possible.
But--at least in Madagascar--there was another side
to this story. It was also precisely at the moment
when the country had been conquered, and these rational-bureaucratic
techniques of administration were being put in place,
that the new administrators began waxing poetic (in
their unofficial writings) about something they called
the "Malagasy soul". This "Malagasy
soul" soon became a stock theme of French writing
on the island. It was represented as the sign of a
profoudly alien mentality, full of quirky passions
and dreamy fantasies, ultimately beyond the grasp of
the understanding of a simple Westerner. As Antoine
Bouillon (1981) has pointed out, no one had ever talked
this way when Madagascar was independent, and foreign
visitors still had to deal with individual Malagasy
actors on anything like equal terms.
This is a useful example, I think, because it's so
obvious what's going on here. The "Malagasy soul"--in
so far as it was anything more than projection--was
a mere by-product, a confused amalgam of everything
that fell outside the extremely narrow parameters set
by the authors' own bureaucratic machinery, or the
rationalistic regimes which they now had the power
to impose.
Modern anthropology of course took shape mainly within
the British and French colonial empires as well. And
it too considered itself a scientific enterprise.
This was the age of Structural Functionalism, and one
of the main things that made Structural Functionalist
anthropology, in the eyes of its practitioners, was
the fact that it was concerned primarily with "norms",
or regularities. What this meant in practice was that
what ethnographers described, and theorists discussed,
was almost exclusively those aspects of social life
which were predictable, repetitive: the human life
cycle, with its age grades and rites of passage, the
domestic cycle, ritual cycles, yearly rounds... Even
succession to political offices was always treated
as an essentially regular processes, which ideally,
should always work themselves out in the same way.
In so far as individuals and unique events appeared
in ethnographies written at this time, they would usually
take the form of case studies meant to illustrate more
general processes. Here and there, there were efforts
to try to find some way of talking about individual
projects and intentions (names like Max Gluckman and
Victor Turner come most immediately to mind) but it
was with the underlying assumption, one could almost
call it faith, that individual actors were ultimately
irrelevant, that whatever their immediate intentions,
they would somehow end up reproducing the same cyclic
structure over and over again.
Of course, it was easier to think of such people as
living outside of history because, for the most part,
they were people living under foreign military occupation,
with no political rights. But as time went on, Western
observers developed an increasing tendency to confuse
causes with effects. Rather than the absence of history
being an effect of the way the authors chose to describe
these societies, it was because of something profoundly
strange about the societies themselves. They were societies
that had rejected history. 'Cold cultures' (Levi-Strauss
1966), exotic societies locked in a primal, mythic
consciousness. And what did this mythic consciousness
consist of? Regularities. Eternal repetition. The faith
that everything comes in unchanging cycles, a 'traditionalist'
philosophy that actively rejects history, personal
idiosyncrasies, the future, and cumulative change in
the name of timeless archetypes and the "eternal
return" (e.g., Eliade 195-).
It is probably only fair to point out such doctrines
tended to put forward most enthusiastically by people
who had only read ethnographies, not ones who had written
them. But still: notice what is happening. The very
attitude which Western observers adopt in the name
of science ends up being projected onto those they
observe; except there, instead of making them seem
scientists, it makes them seen mystical, poetic; strange,
profoundly different sorts of human being.
Since the dissolution of colonial empires, anthropologists
have rediscovered history. But something of the old
attitude remains. There is still a sense that, in order
to be considered objective, one must deny certain aspects
of the subjectivity of those one studies. Few ethnographies
even attain the level of personal engagement one senses
in some of most interesting dispatches and reports
to be found in precolonial European archives. Indeed,
I suspect it is just this sort of denial which is ultimately
responsible for the fact that critics can still write
of anthropology being basically about drawing the boundaries
between an "us" and "them" (Trinh
Minh-Ha 1989), to speak as if its fundamental business
has always, and must necessarily be, to describe some
deeply alien creature--usually referred to as "the
Other"--so different from the anthropologist and
her audience that anything one says about them is likely
to be a mere projection of one's own self (see Said
1982; JanMohammed 1985:59, Spivak 1988, Trouillot 1991,
for but a handful of examples.)(2) Again, anthropologists
themselves do not often talk this way; it is mainly
those who have merely read our books who talk about
"the Other". I myself can't think of anyone
I know who has actually lived and worked for any length
of time with people of a profoundly different culture
who left with the impression that they were--to take
one extreme formulation (Todorov 1982:3)--"so
foreign that they leave me reluctant to admit they
belong to the same species as my own".
Obviously, then, by the time of writing, something
is falling out. In the field, anthropologists have
no trouble recognizing the people we work with as fellow
human beings. But somehow, whatever it was that made
them so recognizable is not coming through in our descriptions.

Perhaps this is not so surprising, considering what
some of these points of recognition are. In my own
case, for instance, the most obvious thing which made
it impossible to think of the people I met in Madagascar
as being profoundly different sorts of human being
was the fact that they were all so different from each
other. And not only that: the ways they were different
from each other seemed pretty much the same as the
ways people were different from each other anywhere
else I'd ever been. From the moment I started having
any sort of prolonged social interaction with people,
I found myself sizing them up as individuals: 'Person
A seems to be basically well meaning, but she's incredibly
self-involved, the sort of person who always feels
her life is in a total crisis, tottering on the brink
of tragedy; Person B, something dishonest about that
guy, like he's always trying to figure out the angles,
wouldn't trust him further than I could throw him;
Person C: optimistic, playful but probably extremely
impractical; Person D: an insensitive, loudmouth jerk...'
It is not hard to see why such assessments tend to
get left out of ethnographies. Even apart from the
last one (anthropologists have a particularly hard
time admitting they could have possibly met anyone
in the field who they didn't like), it all seems hopelessly
subjective. Even a very brief list such as I have just
presented would probably inspire some critic to demand
to know why they should not think I was simply projecting
my own English language categories where they were
entirely inappropriate.
It would not be a particularly fair criticism; first
of all, because such assessments often involved impressions
one could not remotely put into words--and often even
the words one used were obviously inadequate, just
makeshift approximations that stood in for a much more
intuitive sense of what someone seemed to be about.
Anyway, the more I got used to using Malagasy the more
I started substituting Malagasy words for English,
without ever feeling I was crossing any great divide.(3)
But more important, I think, that criticism gives the
sense that what one is doing is some kind of abstract
parlor game, placing familiar categories on unfamiliar
objects, and this is utterly untrue. Making such assessments
is no game. It is an absolutely inevitable and necessary
feature of human interaction. You have to do it because
you have to have some idea how people are likely to
behave--because their behavior, their actions, are
likely to have effects on you, or at the very least
have effects on your friends, or people that you like
or care about. Often they are based on very immediate
concerns, like: what would it be like to spend five
or six hours stuck in the back of a truck with this
person? Would they at least be interesting to talk
to? Would they want to talk to me at all? What's the
chance they would spend the time trying to convert
me to their religion, or to seduce me, or get drunk
and throw up on me (or all three?) For this reason,
too, they are also constantly being tested against
reality. One often gets it wrong--sometimes, disastrously
wrong. Often, too--and this is especially true at first--one
misreads the cues because of cultural differences.
But sometimes it is just because it is in the nature
of such assessments that they are often wrong. This
is an art and not a science, and some people are distinctly
better at it than others.(4) But it is also worth remembering
that even after years of being tested by daily interaction,
no one's knowledge of anyone else can ever be quite
complete or accurate; it always remains something of
an approximation; people will always retain their capability
to surprise you.
It seems to me that one of the prime reasons such assessments
get left out of ethnographies--even most self-consciously
experimental, 'postmodern' ones--is simply because
making them implies a recognition that these are people
who have--or have had-- some power to affect the ethnographer's
life. Obviously, people who are living together, engaged
in common projects, or even just in the habit of engaging
in conversation, are going to have some kind of effect
on one another. But for some reason, ethnographers
tend to find the reciprocal aspects of such relations
embarrassing. One is allowed to meditate guiltily about
the possible ill effects of one's own actions, for
instance, but in writing, the other side of the picture
tends to get swept away. In the end, the effect is
to create a kind of invisible wall, which seems to
prevent the people in the book from having any historical
agency, any ability to have an effect on the ethnographer
and her world,(5) without, however, preventing influence
to flow the other way around. By blotting out the traces
of character, it effaces even the impressions which
recognition of a capacity to affect others' lives will
always, necessarily leave behind.
In part, this is probably just an effect of the conditions
under which people write, which are generally very
different than the conditions under which they conducted
their research. Most ethnographers write their books
safely tucked away in universities far away from the
people they are writing about. By then, those people
are usually no longer in a position to do anything
that will have an immediate affect on them or anyone
close to them-- although the reverse is not necessarily
the case. Most ethnographers do spend a great deal
of time fretting over the possible effects their writing
might have--as I, for example, have worried endlessly
over whether I am betraying my friend Armand by publishing
information that indicates his ancestors were slaves.
It is hard to imagine anything Armand might do, now,
that would have any real effect on me. It would hardly
be surprising if that reality (which is, after all,
the encompassing reality) often tends to be projected
back into the way we write about the very different
experience of fieldwork.

a small anti-relativist diatribe
I think it's important to consider this possibility
because it suggests how often the invisible walls that
appear in our texts are really only made possible by
the existence of other walls that are perfectly visible--in
this case, of a very large and elaborate apparatus
of exclusion which involves such things as international
treaties, border guards, the price of airplane tickets,
and the IMF. Politics does not take place primarily
within texts, though one might not know it from some
of the more abstract debates about the "politics
of representation".
Consider for example the doctrine of moral relativism.
By this I mean the doctrine that, starting from the
(entirely reasonable) premise that one cannot fully
understand any action except in the context of the
actor's cultural universe, concludes that as a consequence,
no one has the right to stand in judgment over any
action committed by someone with a fundamentally different
world view. Now it seems to me this is a doctrine that
could only really emerge as a product of imperialism.
It is a doctrine that would never be produced except
by members of an elite population whose dominance over
the world was so complete and so reliable that they
could live their lives in full confidence that no one
with a fundamentally different world view would ever
be in a position of power over them. When you find
someone arguing that no Westerner has the right to
find fault in, say, the cultural presumption that an
appropriate response to grief at the death of a close
member of one's family is to waylay and kill some random
stranger, they can only do so because of the existence
of complex and very efficient systems of control, involving
armies, police, passports, airport security, immigration
laws, and structures of economic inequality, which
make it almost inconceivable that anyone who felt that
this was an appropriate response to grief would ever
end up living in their neighborhood, or be in striking
distance of their children.(6) Pretenses to some kind
of moral superiority, based on their unwillingness
to morally condemn 'the Other', it seems to me, are
particularly obnoxious in so far as they are often
entirely underpinned by tacit support for real walls
to shut real other people out. And by refusing to consider
someone as a moral person, one provides a perfect justification
to continue to exclude them.
What I am ultimately getting at is that the very least
an ethnographer (or anyone else) owes to people they
write about is to represent them in such a way that
the reader can recognize them as human beings who (as
I said earlier) they might not know, but they could
know; as people who have at least the potential to
inhabit the same moral universe as she. It means recognizing
them as people with the capacity to make history. If
doing so means that we will have to abandon the pretense
of doing some sort of science, then I would say that
kind of science is probably not worth saving anyway.(7)
Not that the mere act of writing this way is itself
going to solve all that many problems. No one was ever
liberated inside a text. Certainly not within a text
they did not write. Recognizing the fact that people
have the capacities to be historical agents does not
itself make it any easier for them to go out and make
history. People do not live in texts. Most of the ones
who appear in this book, for example, live in Madagascar.
There many had, when I knew them managed to wrest a
remarkable degree of autonomy for themselves, but are
also very poor, had little access to any worldwide
networks of influence and communication, in fact, next
to no means to affect anything that happened outside
of Madagascar. Nor has their situation changed dramatically
in the intervening five years or so. Writing about
them with more sensitivity is not likely to do much
to improve this situation; though it certainly wouldn't
hurt.

the capacity to make history
My argument, so far, has much in common with an argument
recently developed by S. P. Mohanty (1989) about the
political implications of relativism. Mohanty too argues
that adopting an extreme relativist position would
be politically disastrous: what basis would we have
to criticize the structures of power in the world,
unless we at least admit that everyone in the world
share certain things in common? At the very least,
he suggests, we have to recognize that we by now all
inhabit a common history (not a series of separate,
culturally bounded "histories"), and that
we all share a "capacity for self-aware historical
agency" (1989:74), which makes us capable of participating
in it. All this seems eminently reasonable to me. But
one might still reasonably ask: what precisely does
this capacity for historical agency consist of? What
is 'historical agency', anyway?
The terms I've been laying out over the course of the
last several pages suggest at least one possible answer.
'Historical actions,' one might say, 'are actions which
could not have been predicted before they happened.'
Or, if that is too simple, then: 'actions considered
memorable afterwards because they could not have been
predicted beforehand'.(8) History, then, is the record
of those actions which are not simply cyclical, repetitive,
or inevitable.
As with my definition of political action in chapter
7, I am trying to be intentionally provocative--ignoring
almost everything that's already been written on the
subject, and proposing an alternative so simple that
it might even be considered simplistic. Some readers
might object that the definitions I propose for both
'politics' and 'history' are so broad that they threaten
to make the terms almost meaningless--leaving no way
to distinguish a spat between sisters or some other
family quarrel and a revolution or a civil war. Perhaps.
But this kind of breadth has advantages as well. If
politics (and history) is something intrinsic to the
nature of social life, even of ordinary, daily interaction,
if it is something which everyone is always doing,
not just the powerful; then it is possible to see engaging
in politics or making history as something which does
not necessarily have to involve preventing anyone else
from doing so. In other words, rather than assuming
that power and exclusion are intrinsic to the very
nature of politics, it allows one to at least imagine
a politics and a history that could still be going
on without them.
These definitions have other implications as well.
If it is really true (as Mohanty suggests) that what
makes us human is above all our capacity to make history,
and if history consists of actions that could not have
been predicted beforehand, then that would mean that
the fundamental measure of our humanity lies in what
we cannot know about each other. To recognize another
person as human would then be to recognize the limits
of one's possible knowledge of them. Their humanity
is inseparable from their capacity to surprise us.
In a way, this fits quite well with what I was saying
about why anthropologists are able to recognize they
are not dealing with a fundamentally different sort
of being. The constant process of assessing other peoples'
characters, which I suggested is an inevitable feature
of any relation between people, are so many innumerable
imperfect ways of approximating something that ultimately
can not be known: how exactly that person is likely
to behave. (Character, noted Aristotle, emerges from
action.) But this is why for all they are necessarily
partial, flawed--like bits of cloth pasted over something
that's invisible--they nonetheless seem to convey such
an immediate sense of common humanity.

writing
At this point I can return briefly to the question
of style. This book contains a number of little dialogues,
ranging from simple two-way dialogues between myself
and one other person, and scenes in which sometimes
as many as four or five different people discuss some
issue with each other as I simply sat and let the tape
recorder run. In translating these dialogues, I did
my best to convey something of the speaker's personalities,
tone, and general attitude-- but usually, provided
very little in the way of setting, context, how these
people had come to be talking around my tape recorder.
Dialogues like this are slightly unusual in modern
ethnographic writing, but hardly something new. Still,
when I showed such texts to fellow anthropologists,
they would often be slightly dubious. "Ah, but
how can you know what these people were really thinking",
or "how can you know everything that's really
going on during such a conversation?" It was said
in such a way as to imply that there was something
very inadequate about such information if one could
not. At first the reaction took me quite aback. It
had never occurred to me one would even be able to
know the full motivations of all the speakers in any
conversation. It was not even clear what it would mean
to. And even if one had some way of knowing that one
of the participants in, say, a transcribed conversation
about Vazimba was leaving out some embarassing detail,
or was desperately trying to impress a woman across
the room he had fallen in love with--or for that matter
was wondering about what kind of price he would get
for my tape recorder if he stole it--what would be
the point of including this information? It would not
have much bearing on the subject of Vazimba. I had
assumed that the very act of reproducing the conversation
in relatively colloquial language would be enough to
convey to the reader a sense that none of these voices
are absolutely authoritative, that everything said
is at least a little incomplete, slanted, and subjective--which
is all any further details would have demonstrated
anyhow.

James Clifford (1980, 1986, 1988) has insisted that
ethnographic knowledge is always, by its nature incomplete
and partial; and I will agree that it is a bit disturbing
that this point ever had to be made, that it was not
always considered self-evident. Since Clifford's work,
and the "crisis of representation" which
shook anthropology in the 1980s, anthropologists have
become used to thinking critically about the process
by which ethnographic knowledge is constructed. This--along
with an (equally postmodern) concern with the dynamics
of social strategies and maneuvering--is of course
the real context for my friends' reaction to those
dialogues, the urge to immediately start reflecting
over the political dynamics that probably lay behind
them. Anyone who has read this book will be well aware
that I myself am not entirely unconcerned with such
questions. But what was really striking was the urge
to understand everything, the sense that simply reproducing
what was said, with a few telling details to give context,
was somehow deceptive. To write in a way which takes
for granted that one would never be able to reveal
everything, that art is the art of selecting details,
is perhaps the hallmark of a literary sensibility.
But at moments like this the postmodern sensibility--for
all it draws its inspiration from literary theory--seems
to move in precisely the opposite direction, and ends
up slipping into a kind of perverse, extreme scientism:
as if it were only if one could know that precisely
what everyone was thinking, every hidden strategy at
play, that we could have real knowledge.(9) Not surprising
then that many conclude that real knowledge is impossible.
To me the issue is not whether this sort of knowledge
is possible (it obviously isn't) but why anyone would
even want it. Would anyone really want to live in a
world where it was possible to have this kind of total
and encompassing knowledge of another human being?
By the definitions I've been developing in particular,
it would be the ultimate dehumanization.
My own argument is that rather than seeing the limits
of our knowledge as a problem, it would be much better
to see it as the best basis on which to build a broader
sense of human commonality. If nothing else, it would
not be an ethnocentric one, prone to the usual criticisms
that it was nothing but a projection of a very particular
Western idea of the rational Subject. In fact, I doubt
it would be possible to find another cultural tradition
that even entertains the fantasy that it might be possible
to have such comprehensive knowledge of others.
To say this is not to claim that people are not products
of their cultures, of social and historical forces
beyond their understanding, only to say that they are
not entirely so--and also, that it is this fact that
ensures that such forces are not entirely beyond our
understanding, they are not unknowable in the same
ultimate sense as people are. Let me give an example
of what I mean. The reader might recall how, in chapter
5, I asked Chantal why it was that people always seemed
to cry at a famadihana, even though it was supposed
to be a happy occasion, and she asked me how I would
feel if someone put my father's decomposing body on
my lap. Here was a Malagasy woman, and one who knew
me rather well, reduced for the moment to wondering
whether I might not really be some sort of bizarre,
alien Other after all, simply by the thought that I
might not be emotionally traumatized by such an experience.
It was not the only time I had seen Malagasy women
discuss whether non- Malagasy really had the same depth
of emotions as they did, whether they really loved
and cared for each other and their families with the
same intensity, whether (by implication) they were
really quite as human. It was a familiar prejudice,
and I had apparently touched it off in her. But the
same people--Chantal included--were in other contexts
equally capable of holding out the fact that Malagasy
people did, in fact, place decomposing bodies on each
other's laps as part of the essence of what made them
Malagasy (and me, who had never done this, a profoundly
different sort of human being). Both-- identities based
on the universality of certain emotional reactions,
and those based on cultural traditions--are equally
constructed. I am not suggesting that we should base
our sense of what is fundamentally human on one and
not the other. What I am suggesting is that we should
base it on whatever it is--that invisible point--that
is capable of pivoting back and forth between the two.
On whatever it is (in this case marked by the name
'Chantal') that is able to try on such identities,
then hold them out and look at them from more of a
distance, in the process of trying to define herself
by defining her relation to other human beings. It
is also what makes it possible for us to create culture--which
is something everyone is always doing, since culture
is nothing more than the process of its own creation--and
which makes it possible to use what we know of how
that process of creation tends to work in order to
understand cultures we have not, ourselves personally,
had a role in creating. Which is what makes it possible
for there to be disciplines like anthropology. I might
never be able to completely understand Chantal--any
more than I will ever be able to completely understand
anyone else--but that which makes it impossible for
either of us to completely understand the other is
also what makes us both capable of sitting down together
and trying to make some generalizations about our respective
societies and cultures.(10)
I have already noted the Malagasy tendency to represent
the source of human intentions and agency--spirits,
ghosts, the soul--as something hidden, invisible, hence
which cannot be ultimately known.11 This is actually
a very common way of representing things. As I have
noted elsewhere (Graeber 1996), it appears all over
the world in conceptions of that aspect of the person
which ethnographers most often refer to, in English,
as "the soul"--what Tyler called the "life
soul"--the hidden seat of human intentionality
which gives us the capacity to act. Even where there
is no explicit metaphysical theory, people do take
it for granted that one cannot ever really know what
another person is likely to do; and usually, that it
is from this unknowable place--in the heart, the head,
the throat, the liver, wherever one happens to place
it--that actions, ideas, new unpredictable things emerge.
Edmund Leach (1982:108) once suggested that what unites
all human beings is not that they are in possession
of an immortal soul, but they are capable of imagining
that they are. Perhaps (aside from the part about "immortality")
these are really not such altogether different things.

Footnotes: 1 The descriptive approach I've employed,
which weaves constantly back and forth between my own
accounts and reconstructions, and those of my informants,
plays into this as well; whatever one might think of
it as an ethnographic style, it does seem appropriate
for a book that is largely about the construction and
circulation of narratives.

2 It is interesting to note that the problem of "knowing
the Other" was originally asked not by anthropologists
or their critics but by European philosophers, and
not about people of other cultures but about anyone
at all. The problem is really the legacy of Decartes,
who left Western philosophy with assumptions so utterly,
radically individualistic that the very existence of
other people--let alone the possibility of knowing
anything about them--became profoundly problematic.
Any number of philosophers contributed their own proposed
solutions to this problem of "the Other"
(Theunissen 1986), attempting to prove why it was indeed
possible to know that anyone else really existed, engaged
in thought, and so on. Sartre, for example, dedicated
a large part of Being and Nothingness (1954), in which
he laid down his basic sociological theory, to just
this problem. The term "Other", in fact,
appears to have passed into social criticism largely
through Sartre's intellectual allies and associates.
Simone de Beauvoir (XXX), for example, argued in The
Second Sex that men, in a male-dominated society, tend
to define women as a kind of fundamental or perennial
Other, which makes it very difficult for women to act
as subjects in their own right; Franz Fanon, in Black
Skin, White Masks (1956), made a rather similar argument
about effects of colonialism. Now, both de Beauvoir
and Fanon were mainly concerned with what all this
means for the victim, but their work opened the way
to taking a terminology originally developed for describing
relations between individuals and adopt it as a way
to describe the political relations between groups.
Hence in a lot of contemporary critical writing one
finds the old problem of 'knowing the Other' transposed,
with an abstract being called "Europe", "the
West", "the European" (or even "Europe
as Subject") striving to define itself in relation
to an "Other" which seems to include anyone
or everyone else. And while philosophers were usually
willing to admit that in the end, one could probably
know something about other people, on this level, it
usually turns out that you can't: the Other always
turns out, through various projective mechanisms (usually
borrowed from Hegel or psychoanalysis, or both) to
be nothing but a shadow-image of one's own self.
In actual practice, when someone accuses an anthropologist--
or all anthropologists--of reducing the people they
describe to an "Other", what they mean is
not quite so grandiose. It is much more about a certain
way of writing. Any author has to assume a certain
degree of common ground, shared with her audience--certain
assumptions about human life and motivations, what
does not need to be explained. When this is combined
with an assumption that the ways or attitudes of certain
other people cannot be treated this way, that needs
to be explained or otherwise accounted for, then this
is what can be called The Other. Of course, stated
this way, there is no reason that this has to reflect
a relation of dominance: but it's also easy to see
how it usually will. A woman for instance can write
a book for other women, to help them to better understand
male psychology, but such a book would be considered
a genre book, of specialized interest and not generic
knowledge. The universal perspective is, at least in
writing, usually assumed to be that of the dominant
group. In this sense speaking of "othering"
definitely does address a legitimate problem, though
rather, it seems to me, in the way of putting a sledgehammer
to it.

3 I still occasionally find myself using Malagasy terms
in sizing up people here in America.

4 The loudmouth jerk might turn out to simply have had
a strange way of reacting to unfamiliar situations
involving foreigners (then again, it might turn out
he really was a loudmouth jerk).

5 Aside of course from conveying information.

6 Actually the example in the back of my mind here is
that of certain critiques I have heard of Renato Rosaldo's
treatment of Ilongot headhunting; but I thought best
to leave out the term 'headhunting' in order to emphasize
that it is not the actual cutting off of heads, but
murder, which is objectionable; what one does with
the body afterwards--cutting off the person's head,
or for that matter, eating it--seems to me a mere question
of aesthetics (unless, for instance, such acts are
done with the intention of terrorizing or traumatizing
someone who is still alive). Here, a relativist would
be perfectly right to say there is no difference between
this and any other killing.
I should probably also add that, given the prior fact
of imperialism, there is no doubt that such relativism
can have ameliorative effects (as the work of Franz
Boas, for instance, undoubtedly did). But this is a
different point.

7 And of course, many would make the argument it doesn't
mean that at all.

8 My definition is in part inspired by a definition
of history proposed by John Comaroff: that "history
is the conceptual space, the time of human experience,
in which social scientific knowledge-- and most of
all, prediction--is proven wrong" (in Comaroff
and Stern 1994:35). But my formulation is sufficiently
different that I doubt he would want to be identified
with it.

9 See Comaroff and Comaroff 1990:8-10 for an analoguous
critique.

10 The doctrine I am describing then is almost exactly
the opposite of the way the notion of an unknowable
Other is usually invoked. I note too that while I myself
would feel distinctly uncomfortable with the prospect
of anyone having comprehensive knowledge of my personal,
individual mind--I really don't see anything particularly
frightening about someone else being able to have encompassing
knowledge of my Americaness, my working class origins,
my mixed Jewish and German ancestry, my maleness, my
avocation as an anthropologist, or any other aspects
which are so obviously public and shared with large
numbers of other people.

11In fact, much of the thinking on the nature of hasina
discussed at various points in the book could be seen
as the rudiments of a social theory, to try to put
a name on invisible mechanisms by which a consensus
between them becomes translated into a power which,
as Durkheim noted, seems to have coercive force outside
of any individual.